


This is Ours

by plumandfinch



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-05
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-10-05 00:15:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17314472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumandfinch/pseuds/plumandfinch
Summary: It happens after the blessed quiet arrives.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [BiteMeMarvelCanon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/BiteMeMarvelCanon/gifts).



> Written for @bitememarvelcanon for the Steggy Secret Santa 2018.

It happens after the blessed quiet arrives. Beeping, clicking, and endless hushed talking have all mercifully stopped and she can finally hear the sound of her own soft breathing again. She no longer has the will or inclination to open her eyes but the glow of the sun settles on her face as someone - that blonde young woman? - very quietly and gently pulls the curtains back. It takes an awful lot of effort to move but an infinitesimal shift of her head and she can feel the warmth.

 

Oh, it reminds her, this sun, of the sun in Italy, which hits her like a revelation. That sun, which really until she ended up in the Caribbean, was like nothing she’d ever seen before. Had he been there with her? 

 

“Was he in Italy?” it takes a mountain of effort to whisper. There’s a hand on her own and the scrape of the bedside chair as it slides a little closer. Sharon.

 

She tries again, shifting her leaden tongue. “Italy?”

 

She knows she is going to fall asleep again, feels the weight of it, like falling backwards. Is he here? But who? The only way to know is to fight against the heaviness of her own eyelids and just look for...well, him. 

 

It’s a blond woman, young and quiet, holding her hand for some reason and she feels a sinking disappointment. It’s heavy, heavier than she’s felt in a long time and as her eyes close again she sighs into the silence, letting the heaviness pull her into the dark with only one last thought before she gives in.

 

_ Steve. _

 

\--

He was expecting more of a sense of deja vu. The sounds are different this time, he thinks in an exhausted way. Even though the mission is the same. 

 

And there, as he looks to his left, is Peggy’s face, beautiful if unsmiling and unaged in his compass. 

 

He is so damn tired.

 

And utterly alone. He had had to almost throw Nat off the quinjet, not an easy task. 

 

“Just lock in the coordinates,” she had argued impatiently, “you don’t have to fly it yourself. Don’t be ridiculous.”

 

In the end, it must have been something in his face. Perhaps, for a moment, he had looked his true age. She had gone and in a final act of whatever the opposite of self preservation was, he had switched off the radio. 

 

He’s dreamed about many things since he came back - a strange thought to have as he angles the jet toward the swirling mass of light - and it’s only now that he remembers the echoes of the last time that wake him, somehow both ice cold and sweating. 

 

The jet starts to shake and he reaches out to steady the compass as he barrels unswervingly into the light.


	2. Chapter 2

She blinks her eyes open at the tinny ring of an alarm and cold winter light streaming in through her inefficient curtains. The hardwood floor is cold under her feet despite the clang of the radiators as she reluctantly swings out of bed. Grumbling, she scuttles over to the dresser and then, besocked, into the kitchen.

 

On the radio, as the kettle is boiling, they play a recording of Bing with the USO that she does not care for. Strange how a man she never saw perform at the front makes her feel colder.  “Not quite to my liking,” she mutters as she reaches into the back of the cabinet for tea. “I thought we’d have the last of you,” she addresses the radio, “in ‘77 when you up and died but then it got wo-”

 

Then she stands stock still in the middle of the kitchen, tea canister in hand, just for a moment, feeling supremely disoriented and then shakes her head as if to clear it.

 

-

The crisp scent of pine drifts through the bustle and chatter of the exterior SSR office thanks to the garlands gaily hung just out of reach of the operators’ boards. Rose gives her a cheery wink as she heads through into the interior office, decorated with only one wilted wreath on Chief Thompson’s door.

 

A pile of reports sits next to her typewriter that she has spent two months avoiding and is sure Jack pushed closer to the center of her desk before she arrived today. They had a tussle about it yesterday.

 

“Carter, it’s finally quiet,” he had said sternly, limping over to her desk, “Just do the damn reports already.”

 

So she does the damn reports and it’s three hours and two additional cups of tea later when there is a commotion and the blare of the alarm has her pulling her revolver out of her desk.

 

\--

He opens his eyes to find himself in the middle of quite a bit of fuss.

 

“I-”

 

“Sir,” comes an order from a bespectacled...telephone operator...with a dangerous glint in her eye that seems familiar, “I need you to put your hands where I can see them.”

 

He raises his khaki-clad arms crisply and blinks. There’s an alarm blaring and the sounds of running and several things happen all at once not the least of which is several people round the corner and that’s when he hears it, a very quiet voice that cuts through all the other noise.

 

“Steve?”

 

\--

Here, together, she doesn’t need to open her eyes to know that he is with her. The two of them barely fit on her narrow bed and she wakes to find herself nestled between the wall and the solid planes of his chest.

 

It had taken the Howling Commandos, Howard, Phillips, and a not very discreet call from the President to get them to this particular moment.

 

“He just appeared, I turned around and there he was,” Rose, an armed picture of calm and logic, had reported.

 

Steve, to his own dismay, had no idea how he managed to arrive in the middle of the SSR, nor could he explain how he survived the Valkyrie, a conversation that raised a particular prickle on the back of Peggy’s neck.

 

After being poked, prodded, and interrogated finally Howard, of all people, had pronounced Steve to be Steve at which time Peggy had burst promptly into tears, to her embarrassment.

 

They hadn’t said much on the way back to her apartment through the quiet of the early morning streets. He had squeezed her hand in the back of the car, not having letting it go since they had got in.

 

“It’s just…” she trails off, feeling that slightly dizzy sensation again and squeezing his hand back, “It seems like such a long time.”

 

And now, she thinks as his arms tighten, at long last they were here.


End file.
